draining development.pdf - Khazar University

The Kleptocrat’s Portfolio Decisions 447relations disaster for Switzerland,” said Mark Pieth, the well-knownSwiss professor and anticorruption campaigner. 34 The money wouldhave fed over one million Haitians for at least two weeks. The Swiss governmentwas hugely embarrassed and immediately stepped in and statedthe money would not be returned to the Duvaliers. It then rushedthrough new, retroactive, legislation, the Duvalier Law, which will beused by Switzerland if there is a perception that there is no longer a functioningjudicial system in a victim country: prosecutors will have 10years from the date on which monies are frozen in which to bring confiscationproceedings. 35 This legislation is potentially groundbreakingbecause it appears to remove the necessity for the victim state to requestassistance, one of the great weaknesses of the UNCAC regime.However, the uncomfortable fact is that Switzerland has been caughtup in this sort of scandal before. In 2009, the heirs of Mobutu Seise Seko,the notorious dictator of the former Zaire, now the Democratic Republicof the Congo, who is reckoned to have misappropriated about US$12billion in aid money, provided largely by the World Bank, recoveredabout US$7.4 million, despite assurances given by the Swiss foreign ministerin 2007 that the money would be returned to the Congolese people(Wrong 2000). The reason, apparently, why this money was not returnedto the people was that the Congolese government did not request thereturn.These are but two examples of failures in asset recovery that are highprofile. The reality is that the efforts to recover stolen assets are all toooften thwarted. International asset recovery depends on cooperationamong states. If this cooperation is not given by the state that has beenthe victim of the grand corruption involved, there is often little that canbe done by other states to assist. It is hoped that other states will considerfollowing the lead of Switzerland in this regard.The case studies in this chapter demonstrate that there are a numberof unique features in high-level state corruption that are the more strikingfor their repetition across cases. An example is the use of nationalsecurity as the pretext for the urgent and secret disbursement of funds ofthe central government. One sees this with Abacha and Chiluba, and inKenya. In the case of the Suhartos, the methodology was different,although the president was a former general and ran a quasi-militarydictatorship. More surprising, perhaps, is the seeming ease of extracting